APPENDIX A THEORIES OF THE WILL

I append with some hesitation a few notes on the more technical aspects of a question the proper treatment of which would require a volume. The whole problem of the will is inextricably bound up with that of dualism. The true dualism I take to be the contrast in man between two wills, one of which is felt as vital impulse (élan vital) and the other as vital control (frein vital). The crucial point would seem to be the proper place of intellect in its relation to the higher will. It is hard, on the one hand, to be reasonable without becoming rationalistic, and, on the other, to have faith without falling into credulity. The Christian form of the difficulty grew up in connection with the Pauline opposition between a law of the spirit and a law of the members; if the law of the spirit is to exercise its control effectually, it needs, according to the Christian, a greater or lesser degree of divine coöperation. So that if one wishes to get at a Christian’s views of man’s will the best method is frequently to ascertain his views of God’s will.

One of the first to proclaim the superiority of the divine will over the divine mind was Origen. The most important of Christian voluntarists is, however, Saint Augustine. He asserts the primacy of will in both man and God and on psychological as well as on theological grounds. One of the arguments that he employs was influential on later voluntarists like Duns Scotus.⁠[141] Will, says Augustine, reveals itself above all in the act of attention or concentration; it therefore takes precedence of intellect because it selects the field of facts or order of perceptions to which the intellect attends and of which it acquires knowledge.⁠[142]⁠

With the influence of Aristotle from the latter part of the twelfth century on, there was a tendency to revert to Greek intellectualism and to reverse the Augustinian position in regard to will. Saint Thomas Aquinas, for example, not only grants a superior dignity to man’s intellect as compared with his will,⁠[143] but holds that the divine will is subordinate to the divine wisdom. It is hardly necessary to add that Saint Thomas is far from being a pure rationalist: man’s intellect, though superior to his will, is infinitely transcended by the divine will.

To be sure the working of God’s will as it had been affirmed traditionally with the support of Revelation had been felt from the outset, especially in connection with the more extreme forms of the doctrine of grace, to be a stumbling block to man’s reason. The central preoccupation of the scholastic philosophy may indeed be said to have been the reconciliation of faith in this sense with reason.⁠[144] This great effort culminated in Saint Thomas in whose system reason and faith seem to coöperate harmoniously. Theological truth, he maintained, though beyond reason, is not contrary to it.

The outstanding trait of the later scholasticism is the tendency of reason and faith once more to separate and to appear as irreconcilable. The “realist,” Duns Scotus, develops the thesis that “will is superior to intellect”⁠[145] (Voluntas est superior intellectu) in both man and God. The nominalist, William of Occam, affirms in a still more uncompromising fashion that God’s will is absolute and arbitrary. God does not will a thing because it is just, but it is just because he wills it. Theology may not hope to find support in reason. It must be accepted on the authority of Revelation and the Church.

This last stage of scholasticism is the point of departure for various movements that seem at first sight to have very little in common—for example, Lutheranism and Jansenism as well as the philosophies of Bacon and Descartes. The Jansenist and Lutheran exalt God’s will at the expense of reason by an extreme interpretation of grace. Descartes and Bacon, on the other hand, are interested, though in very different ways, in the use that may be made of reason in the natural order. They continue to pay more or less sincere homage to religion conceived as indissolubly bound up with incomprehensible theological mysteries. It is especially important to ascertain Descartes’s conception of the will in view of his position as the father of modern philosophy. We need to discriminate sharply between his conceptions of man’s will and God’s will. God’s will he holds to be absolute and arbitrary and to this extent he reminds us of Duns Scotus.⁠[146] His ultimate temper, however, is not that of the Christian voluntarist, inasmuch as he is interested above all in working out a mechanical law for phenomenal nature. His attitude towards God’s will is to be explained in two ways: first by his extreme caution, not to say timidity; with the fate of Galileo fresh in mind he was almost morbidly apprehensive of becoming embroiled with the theologians. He was moved in the second place, according to M. Gilson,⁠[147] by the desire to get rid of final causes in the interest of his own mechanistic hypothesis.

According to Descartes himself what he meant by his Cogito ergo sum was that one should start from the immediate data of consciousness.⁠[148] Practically he relegates the higher will to God (as understood by the theologians) and gives the first place among these data to mind or reason. He proceeds to set up a sharp dualism between mind and matter conceived as separate substances. As for man’s will, it is according to Descartes in itself infinite and to that extent reminds us of the divine will.⁠[149] On closer scrutiny, however, this infinite liberty of the will turns out to be only a liberty to err. The will escapes from error only in so far as it is determined by reason.⁠[150] In his tendency thus to make right will depend upon right reason, as well as in his practical ethics,⁠[151] Descartes reminds us strongly of the Stoics.

By “reason,” it is scarcely necessary to add, Descartes means logical and mathematical reason. The only ideas that should determine the will and that one can follow without danger of error are clear and distinct ideas. No tendency is more marked in the Cartesian system than to conceive as it were mathematically of the truth and reality of both the human and the natural order. An extreme example of the same tendency is the geometrical form that Spinoza gives to his “Ethics.” Descartes would make of God himself a “clear” idea and demonstrate him in almost geometrical fashion.⁠[152] He thus contradicts the universal experience of mankind which is that the truths on which the inner life depends are not clear in the logical or any other sense. These truths are rather a matter of elusive intuition.

Perhaps the first person to assert intuition against the abstract reasoning of Descartes was Pascal. A whole order of truths, to employ Pascal’s own distinction, can be attained, not by l’esprit de géométrie, but only by l’esprit de finesse. To the rationalistic God of Descartes he opposes Dieu sensible au cœur. “Heart” means practically “grace,” and grace Pascal associates with what was rapidly becoming an impossible theology. What is conspicuous indeed in the whole transition from the mediæval to the modern period is the failure to disengage the truths of the higher will from theology and to deal with them experimentally as “immediate data of consciousness.” On the contrary, as the result of the endless disputes of Jansenists with Jesuits, of Catholics with Protestants, and of the various Protestant sects with one another, these truths became involved in a mass of almost incredible theological subtleties. The final reply to these subtleties was Voltaire. Especially significant is his article “Grâce” in the “Dictionnaire philosophique,” the third section of which concludes as follows: “Ah! supralapsaires, infralapsaires, gratuits, suffisants, efficaciens, jansénistes, molinistes, devenez enfin hommes et ne troublez plus la terre pour des sottises si absurdes et si abominables.”

With the virtual substitution by Descartes of “reason” for what is truly transcendent in man, namely the higher will, the genuine dualism is compromised and the way opened for monistic developments. The tendency towards a rationalistic pantheism is manifest in Spinoza who reveals in many respects the Cartesian influence. Spinoza inclines to get rid of the Cartesian dualism between mind and matter by denying to mind any superiority of substance.⁠[153] Man is in nature not as one empire in another empire but as a part in a whole. Man must adjust his will to the divine will, to be sure, but God is declared to be the same as “nature.” When one has made an identification of this kind, it will not be possible by any number of subsidiary distinctions—for example, by setting up a sort of dualism in the cosmic process itself in the form of a natura naturans and a natura naturata—to maintain a sound doctrine of the will and to avoid pantheistic confusion. The God or “nature” to which Spinoza would have man conform his will is closely related to reason of a distinctly Cartesian type; so that to adjust one’s will to God or nature is equivalent to adjusting it to reason. Reason and will are indeed for Spinoza identical.⁠[154] Here as elsewhere Spinoza revives more completely perhaps than any other modern philosopher of the first rank the Stoical position.

Quite apart from Spinoza the followers of Descartes⁠[155] tended to suppress the dualism between mind and matter in favor of universal mechanism. Descartes himself had seen in animals only automata; the temptation proved irresistible to look on man in the same way.⁠[156] A parallel tendency was that of the English empiricists and utilitarians to deny that mind is transcendent, to assert that there is “nothing in the intellect that was not previously in the senses.” At the same time they fail to recognize a quality of will in man that sets him above the natural order and so incline strongly towards a naturalistic determinism. The denial of the freedom of the will is especially complete in Hobbes and Hume.⁠[157] Philosophy in its main trend from Descartes to Hume seemed to exalt analysis at the expense of synthesis and to be ready to sacrifice spontaneity to mechanism. Of the world as envisaged by Hume in particular one might say with Mephistopheles: “Fehlt leider! nur das geistige Band!” Among those who sought to restore unity and freedom to philosophy, the most important is Immanuel Kant. In the matter of the will, he asserts that in the “noumenal” realm, the realm of the “thing-in-itself,” man is perfectly free; as a phenomenon among other phenomena, on the contrary, man is, he admits, as thoroughly determined as Hume had maintained. The question arises as to the value of this purely “noumenal” liberty in the actual emergencies of life. Huxley remarks apropos of this Kantian conception of the will: “Metaphysicians, as a rule, are sadly deficient in the sense of humor; or they would surely abstain from advancing propositions which, when stripped of the verbiage in which they are disguised, appear to the profane eye to be bare shams, naked but not ashamed.”⁠[158] The professional metaphysician often betrays an even more serious lack than that of a sense of humor—a lack, namely, of common sense. This lack appears in Huxley’s own attitude towards the will when compared, let us say, with that of Dr. Johnson.

Kant’s views regarding the “categorical imperative,” as expounded in his “Critique of Practical Reason,” seem especially open to objection from the point of view of common sense. The categorical imperative is conceived as something a priori, not as based on experience. It is not a living intuition of a will that is set above the cosmic process (which includes a man’s natural self) and that acts upon this cosmic process restrictively and selectively. It is rather a rigid metaphysical abstraction that operates without reference to the happiness of the individual⁠[159] or the special circumstances to which he needs to adjust himself.⁠[160] Moreover, it is, as I have pointed out (p. 226), a will to act and not a will to refrain from acting. One may therefore raise the question whether it can be counted on to quell effectually the expansive “lusts” of the natural man—for example, the lust of domination. As an expression of cosmic reason, the categorical imperative reminds one of the reason-will of the Stoics. The reason, however, that the Stoic took as his guiding principle (τὸ ἡγεμονικόν) was conceived as one with reality; whereas the conclusions of the “Critique of Pure Reason,” so far as the relation between reason and reality is concerned, are largely sceptical. Kant therefore asks us to make certain important affirmations, not as necessarily true in themselves, but as postulates of the practical reason. He thus prepares the way for the Philosophie des Als Ob of Vaihinger. According to Vaihinger, you do not will a thing because it is true; you merely act as if it were true on the ground that it is a “useful fiction.”⁠[161] The “As-if” philosophy, again, is akin to the point of view of the pragmatist. The pragmatist does not conceive of truth as something that already exists: he makes his truth as he goes along, in other words he takes that to be true which seems useful or agreeable to his ordinary self. He thus tends to eliminate both the high impersonal standard and the ethical will that, with reference to this standard, opposes bounds to the expansive desires.

Though the philosophy of Kant supplies the freedom and the synthetic element that were absent from a philosophy like that of Hume, it supplies them in an abstract and rationalistic way. It does not satisfy the craving for immediacy. Those who felt this craving sought to gratify it by basing ethics on the emotions. Kant’s “Critique of Practical Reason” suggests that the ultimate reality, the “thing-in-itself,” is very closely related to will. Schopenhauer actually pushes on to the identification of reality and will. Only the will that he sets up is very different from the categorical imperative.⁠[162] It is a cosmic will conceived as a will to live and at the same time as the source of evil. Schopenhauer does not oppose to this cosmic nisus a higher will that may control it and even renounce it; if he had he might have achieved a true dualism. Instead he affirms expressly that the will, as he understands it, should include only that which is common to man and beast.⁠[163] He hopes to get the equivalent of a true dualism by a recourse to the benevolent theory of ethics, especially, as we have seen (p. 73), to Rousseau’s doctrine of natural pity. At the same time Schopenhauer inclines on occasion to see in actual nature not pity but ruthless struggle, thus anticipating Darwin. Nietzsche follows Schopenhauer in according the primacy to will but denies natural pity and affirms that the will that is fundamental in man is the will to power. He is thus related, on the one hand, to Hobbes and the Machiavellians, and, on the other, to the evolutionists.

One should note that those who gratify their thirst for immediacy by basing ethics on instinct or impulse, whether they conceive of the resulting “will” as a will to brotherhood or a will to power, agree in denying that the element of inhibition is primary or vital; they dismiss everything that interferes with the free expansion of “will” as artificial or conventional. Moreover, the attempt to recover the unity and spontaneity of instinct usually involves another dualism—that between a man’s “heart” (in the sense of his impulsive and emotional self) and his “head” (in the sense of his analytical intellect) which destroys unity and leads him to see things, as Wordsworth phrases it, “in disconnection dead and spiritless.”

The difficulties in the way of maintaining the benevolent theory of ethics have increased in direct measure as the nature “red in tooth and claw” of the evolutionist has been substituted for the idyllic nature of Rousseau. These difficulties may be illustrated from Huxley’s attempt to deal with the problem of the will. In his “Evolution and Ethics” (Romanes Lecture, 1893) he develops the thesis that civilization and the cosmic process are sharply at variance with one another. A man should therefore in the interests of society seek to rise superior to this process. The lecture ends with an eloquent exhortation to effort and struggle along these anti-cosmic lines. At the same time Huxley denies that man has a will that transcends the cosmic process and moves in an opposite direction from it. He adopts unreservedly the determinism of Hume.⁠[164] He proclaims that “man, physical, intellectual and moral, is as much a part of nature, as purely a part of the cosmic process as the humblest weed.”⁠[165] In that case, if one is to avoid the Nietzschean conclusion, it would seem necessary to affirm like Rousseau and the sentimentalists some principle of benevolence in Nature herself. On the contrary, Huxley declares in the most uncompromising fashion that Nature is ruthless.⁠[166] When one confronts with one another passages of the kind I have been citing it is hard to avoid the conclusion reached by Mr. P. E. More⁠[167] that Huxley is in his main trend a naturalistic sophist.

Recent philosophers like Bergson and James and Croce cannot be said to differ essentially in their dealings with the will from the older partisans of a subrational unity and spontaneity as a mode of escape from mechanism. Bergson exalts a type of “intuition” that involves a more or less complete turning away from the analytical intellect on the ground that it leads to the setting up of a “block universe”; at the same time he eliminates the will to refrain (frein vital) in favor of élan vital. He differs however from many of his romantic forbears, as I have already remarked (p. 17), by associating élan vital not with a will to brotherhood but with a will to power. Signor Piccoli points out that Croce’s view of the will has much in common with that of Bergson.⁠[168] Croce is not, however, so frankly imperialistic. James, again, though he felt himself in intimate accord with the ideas of Bergson, is nearer to the older romantic psychology. Consider, for example, his essay “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.” Men are not most human, it would seem, in their moments of strenuous effort with reference to a human law that they possess in common; on the contrary, they are most themselves in the reveries of their idle and irresponsible moments:⁠[169] they should at least try to enter sympathetically into one another’s romantic dreams. In general the difficulty of discovering any basis for a genuine ethical communion among men becomes acute if one seeks, like James and Bergson, to prove freedom and spontaneity by the “gushing forth” of novelty in the cosmic process.⁠[170] It is hard to see how men can come together in their differences. Moreover, Nature herself may be active in producing the vital variations that the intellect can neither foresee nor formulate, but the man in whom the “creative” evolution is taking place is not active; from a truly human point of view, he remains both passive and purposeless. In the popular summing up of this whole philosophical trend, he does not know where he is going but merely that he is on the way. He may be sure in any case that, as a result of his failure to put forth a specifically human quality of will, he is not on the way to peace or brotherhood.

I have already said something about two contemporary doctrines, psycho-analysis and behaviorism, that, at least as popularly interpreted, tend to break down the principle of control in human nature, and to that extent to disintegrate civilization. It may be well to add a word about behaviorism. Man is an animal among other animals, and in so far is subject to laboratory methods. When, however, one attempts to base a complete explanation of conduct on such methods,⁠[171] when, on the pretext that one must be “objective,” one refuses to discriminate qualitatively between the behavior of a man and that of a frog, the result is naturalism gone mad. The behaviorist is not only pushing the mechanistic view of life to a point where he denies certain “immediate data of consciousness” but, in his eagerness to reduce everything to stimuli and physical reactions, he is in a fair way to eliminate consciousness itself. If, as Dr. Johnson says, all experience bears witness to the freedom of the will, one must conclude that the extreme behaviorist is turning his back on something that is highly experimental in favor of a theory.

In general, this very inadequate review of theories of the will held by the professional philosophers seems to confirm the wider survey I have attempted in the body of this volume. If the older treatment of the will led to a theological nightmare, the more recent treatment has only too often resulted in a metaphysical bewilderment. There has been a failure, on the whole, to assert in a positive and critical form certain truths of the inner life that were compromised by the interminable wranglings of the religious sects about God’s will and its mode of operation.